THEATER REVIEW

THEATER REVIEW; Not Your Typical Russian Revolution

By D. J. R. BRUCKNER

Published: November 27, 1997

The Irondale Ensemble Project likes its plays layered. The company usually takes a story or drama and turns its performance into a dramatic disquisition on the ideas in the tale. With its production of Bertolt Brecht's 1931 parable ''The Mother,'' it may be performing its ultimate stretch: this version spans 92 years.

As for texture: while Irondale's production is a self-reflective take on Brecht, Brecht intended a kind of philosophical cartoon of Maxim Gorky's ''Mother,'' a novel about the 1905 revolution in Russia. Gorky, a revolutionary firebrand, wrote the book in 1906 while on the lam in the United States.

The story is pliant enough to be kneaded into any shape. The mother of one of the most radical of the 1905 rebels, at first apprehensive about the people her son associates with and the threat of an assault on the familiar order of life, is transformed into the nation's most effective symbol of rebellion by the humiliations she suffers when she defends her son and then by the boundless grief she feels when he is killed.

In Irondale's production, heroic Reds do battle against blind patriots, neighbors turn into spies or thugs, the police are dangerous clowns, peasants and craftsmen waste their strength fighting each other while the nobles feast, and crowds regularly burst into celebratory or inflammatory songs. (All crowds are eight people, but full-throated ones.)

But history this is not. The curtain is a blowup of a 1933 front page of The New York Times headlining the end of Prohibition -- something never mentioned in the play. The first anthem is interrupted by J. Edgar Hoover in full drag playing master of ceremonies and threatening the audience for enjoying this subversive stuff. Throughout, the dialogue can bounce from Cossacks and a czar-bound church to the corrosive greed of the current bull market.

As the mother becomes a true and virtuous Bolshevik, a man in her entourage feels some compunction to tell us that a lot of leaders in Russia and Eastern Europe between then and now were evil because they gave Communism a bad reputation when, actually, it was a good idea. He is not persuasive, but one understands his impulse.

How seriously Irondale ever takes its radical thinking is hard to gauge. Members of the company take such infectious delight in theatrical innovation that, even though all its plays are political, politics seems a faded presence. In ''The Mother'' Jim Niesen's directing is characteristically energetic, and as the action springs back and forth among different authors and times, he keeps the lines separating them evident but not intrusive. Hans Eisler's music is fairly attuned to the action and spirit of the piece except in a couple of the songs. And, as usual, the cast has the discipline of a good ensemble.

Performances continue through Dec. 20 at the Theater for the New City.

THE MOTHER

By Bertolt Brecht; English version by Lee Baxandall; directed by Jim Niesen; music by Hans Eisler; musical direction by Walter Thompson; sets by Kennon Rothchild; costumes by Christianne Myers; lighting by Herrick Goldman. Presented by the Irondale Ensemble Project. At Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue, at 10th Street, East Village.